The "Flaneur"
During my visits to Erfurt, Germany, I often eat my lunches at Ballenbergers restaurant, located in the cobbled Gotthardstraße, perpendicular to the medieval Krämerbrücke. Like a lot of high-end German restaurants, it offers a small library for its guests—magazines stacked up carelessly on the shelves, going back a few years. The existence of such a large, high-end literary culture in Germany has always me. Germans know more about America than many Americans.
I saw Cicero magazine there and started browsing through a few issues. Cicero offers its readers a "commentary" on a variety of subjects—as opposed to a simple "opinion" magazine—always with humor, irony, and skepticism. It reminds me of the New Yorker from the old days, before it took a leftist bent and became humorless and uncreative.
In its last pages, Cicero runs a regular column titled "Der Flaneur". I did not recognize "Flaneur" right away and looked it up on Wikipedia. In 19th century Europe, a Flaneur denoted an unattached, educated man-of-means who lived in a big city and spent time each day strolling through its streets and observing the World around him. In other words, Der Flaneur fits right into the ethos of Cicero, letting its journalists observe the world around them.
I think of American writers like Hemingway or Edgar Allan Poe—Poe strolling the streets of Paris with his character, the private detective C. Auguste Dupin, or Hemingway's Jake Barnes riding in a Parisian taxi to pick up a prostitute, without really thinking about it.
In its May, 2026, issue, Der Flaneur ran the article "Das Gluck, angekommen zu sein". In English, it means "The Pleasure of Arriving" at a comfortable, familiar place. A man arrives at his usual café in Paris, and when the usual waiter approaches his table, the man says to him, "Wie immer, bitte!" In English, "The usual, please!" The man enjoys "das Behagen an der schönen Wiederholung," or the good feeling of returning to his usual haunt.
But the article adds a bit ominously "As long as it lasts." As we age, keeping things the same has a certain urgency. Der Flaneur adds that the playwright Goethe poses his character Faust in a similar dilemma. He doesn't want things to change, so he sells his soul to the Devil to maintain a "Zustand des Glücks und Gestilltheit," his good luck, letting doubt subside. The Devil, like the waiter, says to him "Make yourself comfortable. You're among friends, here."
Der Flaneur posits naughtily that modern man has already resolved this dilemma—achieving the desired results in his car. He distracts himself with music and entertainment that electronic devices provide him, and the car's "Multifunktions-lenkrad", a multi-tasking steering-wheel. They give him the sensation of a pleasurable arrival somewhere, while in reality, the only fulfillment he gets comes from the static movement of his car.
Der Flaneur concludes his article by talking about the Mayan culture in Mexico. "They knew about wheels," he states because archeologists have found children's toys with wheels—dogs and jaguars that moved with wheels, but archeologists could not find that they used wheels in the daily chores they undertook to maintain the survival of their society.
Der Flaneur concludes that the wheel contributed irrevocably to innovation and even revolution, so it disrupted the givens in their society, which they did not want. Modern societies neet to take this into account. To oppose disruption and innovation means to turn against the wheel as a measure of progressive change in our society.